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Forum:Wiki purpose policy proposal
Hello everyone, After some thought and discussion with another admin I propose that we enact a clearer policy about what kind of content should be covered by this wiki. The goal would be to refocus the wiki by making it clear that its main purpose is to document the Civilization games. Over time the wiki has accrued a great quantity of fluff articles and content containing information not pertinent to the civilization game series, most of which consists of historical information copied from Wikipedia and editorialized by several users. These clutter up the site's navigation, hide the actual content in articles, are one of the most frequent vandalism targets. They're also entirely useless to anyone visiting the wiki to learn about the Civilization game series. So to further this goal I propose we enact the following guidelines : * Articles should be about the Civilization game series, it's community, and the games' contents. * Articles need not contain information about the real life version of game content other then that already provided by the game. **Link to Wikipedia instead when you want to provide that kind of information. **Strategy and information derived from playing the game is of course always welcome! These are work in progress policies and all opinions are welcome. Were they to be enacted you can expect a great number of articles to be redirected to game related pages as well as many content pages being progressively purged to accommodate the new guidelines. --Becer (talk) 18:58, July 12, 2014 (UTC) :These sound like very reasonable ideas to me. Additionally, there are several very short articles with little to no content about the game itself, better presented as a list on a single page. An example of such redundant articles would be the articles in Category:City-states. Notice that it was me in the first hand who created many of those articles... I guess the point was that this way lists of them could be created automatically, as has been done in the City-state (Civ5) page: it creates lists automatically based on categories. —ZeroOne (talk) 19:28, July 12, 2014 (UTC) :"Articles should be about the Civilization game series, ..." - and imitations and spinoffs, please! -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:40, July 13, 2014 (UTC) ::Oh good point Robin! Of course. That should find under the community label right? --Becer (talk) 02:29, July 13, 2014 (UTC) :Does this mean that pages would no longer feature Trivia sections unless these specifically appear in Civilopedia or the game's XML files? I'm not opposed to such a policy, but I want to be sure that I properly understand what you're proposing. -Mythril Wyrm (talk) 01:30, July 18, 2014 (UTC) ::Good question. What it means is that it must be possible to link the information you're including to the gameplay somehow, be it hard numbers, gameplay tips, metagaming, community sentiment, concept art. Anything is fair game as long as it comes either from the game or the community's interaction with it. Essentially the game character Ghandi and the real person Gandhi are 2 entirely different subjects, one of which we choose to cover. For the real person we can simply provide a link to Wikipedia instead of copying from it. :: Of course there's always exceptions and your judgment need apply. A valid example (That I haven't researched) would be adding something like "English Longbowmen were reputedly able to shoot further than anyone else. The game shows this by giving them +1 range." to a trivia section like you mentioned. As you can see there is a link to the game so this is relevant information. If you have an idea on how to make these guidelines more sensible please do post it! Be aware that these are guidelines so there's no negative consequences to not following them, except that content that doesn't follow them is fair game for edits/deletion later on. Hopefully that helped! --Becer (talk) 14:49, July 18, 2014 (UTC) :::That's indeed a good question that Mythril Wyrm makes, but I think Becer managed it quite well. Although I think there must be cases of trivia that can be argued both for and against inclusion. But I guess we'd just have to talk those out. :::Take the Brazilian (Civ5) page and its "factoids". There are currently four items: :::#"Brasília is one of around ten capitals in the world that is a planned city." :::#"Carnival accounts for seventy per cent of the nation's annual tourist trade" :::#"From the 1500s through the 1700s, the bandeirantes explored and mapped much of the Amazon" :::#"Meanings and origins of Brazilian cities' and states' names" :::Now, I think only the second point is relevant to the game, because Carnival is the unique ability of Brazilia. The final list I'd delete without hesitation, I cannot see why we'd want to turn this wiki into an English-Portuguese dictionary. (Although I get that someone has put lots of love into that article, but still.) :::By the way, "factoids" was in quotation marks above because, well, has anyone looked up the dictionary definition of the word "factoid"? "An item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact". Only in North American English it means something like a piece of trivia. I'd vote for changing those factoid sections to trivia sections. :::—ZeroOne (talk) 21:48, July 18, 2014 (UTC) ::::Becer: Thank you for your detailed and thorough answer to my question. You provide some good guidelines for future editing. ::::ZeroOne: That's a good point to raise, especially when considering the guidelines given above. The first three factoids on the Brazil page, however, come directly from Brazil's Civilopedia entry (as listed at the bottom of this page). Two of them aren't directly relevant to gameplay, but if we're trying to provide a thorough and comprehensive guide to the Civilization games, I would argue that any information from an in-game resource like Civilopedia should be included in its original, unaltered state (unless it's factually inaccurate or contains spelling or grammatical errors). If we decide that it's acceptable to remove this kind of information from pages, we're setting a precedent for this all-purpose wiki to turn into a strategy wiki. I'm not necessarily opposed to a change of direction, but if we decide to make one, I want to be sure that I understand it and that the long-term effects of such a change have been taken into consideration. ::::And while I've defended the use of "Factoids" in the section names, I'm more than willing to change it to "Trivia" if that would be less misleading or confusing to people who don't use American English. -Mythril Wyrm (talk) 22:34, July 18, 2014 (UTC) :::::Oh, OK, I didn't realize those points were from Civilopedia too. I thought they were something extra, the section above it is already titled "Civilopedia entry". I guess the factoids can stay then, but I'll put them under the Civilopedia entry section and remove the final one. —ZeroOne (talk) 20:48, July 21, 2014 (UTC) ::::::And I went through to merge, rename, and update all of the Factoids sections for the sake of maintaining consistency with both our editorial policy and Civilopedia. Russia's page is now the only one that contains trivia not detailed in Civilopedia, though I explicitly stated how the additional information was relevant to the game. I can always (re)move it if it seems out of place. -Mythril Wyrm (talk) 05:07, July 22, 2014 (UTC) Just to confirm we're on the same page and all, are we still including the open-source FreeCiv as part of the Civilization series for the purposes of documentation? Also, are spin-offs are predecessors allowed a place here (specifically, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and it's expansion, Alien Crossfire, as well s and Colonization/FreeCol).--TwoTailedFox (My Talk Page) 20:30, July 26, 2014 (UTC) :Yup that's perfectly fine, and covered under the first guideline : "Articles should be about the Civilization game series, it's community, and the games' contents." FreeCiv is a community product so it fits, as for the spin-offs as long as the community feels like they fit in the Civilization series, they belong here. --Becer (talk) 21:11, July 26, 2014 (UTC) ::The first guideline should probably be modified to say that part more explicitly so that people don't need to guess. —ZeroOne (talk) 21:18, July 26, 2014 (UTC) :::I guess my issue with the guidelines being too specific is that it'll lead to the impression that anything not explicitly detailed within isn't allowed. --Becer (talk) 21:27, July 26, 2014 (UTC) ::::Pretty much that. Always helps to clarify :).--TwoTailedFox (My Talk Page) 21:43, July 26, 2014 (UTC)